Tag Archives: justice

The penultimate instalment of my autobiography before I revert to my normal blogs

A year after Arthur Thomas’s pardon, a Royal Commission condemned the policeman who’d planted the cartridge, and said Arthur should never have been charged. I sat through the weeks of testimony, crocheting a colourful rug from all the scraps of wool I had, and I think driving the male chauvinists around me quite mad!

I was back home towards the end when Patrick took time off from his office to hear the last stages of the inquiry which was all based on his findings. He rang and said they were being asked to put in a claim for what the investigation had cost them, and Jim Sprott was claiming $150,000. Patrick said it didn’t feel right climbing on this bandwagon of claims… so I told him about the painter Whistler’s damages of a farthing in England when he sued Ruskin for defamation in 1870, and suggested Patrick likewise claim a dollar – otherwise you’ll be written out of the court’s findings, I said.

So he did claim a dollar. Arthur was given a million dollars in compensation, and Patrick was rewarded with an OBE. The following year the Queen presented it to him, at the same time that my daughter received her Gold Medal from the Duke of Edinburgh

While all these dramas were playing out, I resigned as Woman’s Editor of the Star, feeling that the increased attacks and hostility from feminists would lose their sting if I wasn’t there, and the women’s pages might become unmolested!

I took the children to England for a holiday, and when we returned took up writing my columns again, and was commissioned to write several books. I once calculated that fifteen years of writing two columns of a thousand words a week, probably added up to about 780,000 words, and that didn’t include all the articles and interviews I wrote in that time as well. At least half as much again, I suspect.

A column which covered vivisection and the experiments and horrible operations that people like South African heart surgeon Dr Christian Barnard performed on animals, caused huge repercussions. It revived the moribund anti-vivisection society known as SAFE, (Save Animals from Experimentation) and Patrick and I became president and vice-president.

This column also triggered a big meeting of angry doctors at the Medical School at Auckland University where they reportedly discussed: ‘What to do about Valerie Davies’. At the time I had also castigated the practise of every medical student having their own rat to kill – they bashed it on the table by holding its tail, before dissecting it.

They sent my article to Christian Barnard in South Africa, who’d become a high-living celebrity by then, and he responded by sue-ing me and the Star. The Star cravenly paid up the money he demanded, but I refused, telling my solicitor I’d rather go to jail. The children were devastated, and my son even had tears rolling down his cheeks when I explained what I was doing.

In the event my clever lawyer wrote told Barnard’s solicitor that my defence would be that I’d found all the hideous boasts about making a two headed dog, and the screams of a baboon wrenched from his mate to take his heart for an experiment, in Dr Barnard’s own autobiography, and a TV interview. We heard no more!

I continued writing columns that enraged people, writing of the barbaric treatment of calves in modern farming, to the use of 245T (a dioxin based pesticide) the indiscriminate felling of trees, and other environmental concerns. After a column on climate change and the ozone layer, a university professor wrote a scathing letter to the paper calling me a ‘knee-jerk environmentalist’, while a professor of paediatrics, rang me at home he was so furious when I wrote that babies should never be left to cry as it broke their trust in their parents.

Now all the research into brain function has proved me right. Child psychology preaches the benefits of cuddling and of feel- good pheromones connecting in the brain, and the dangers of cortisone building up in the brain if babies are left to cry, which leaves them prone to depression and a host of problems as they grow older…

Sometimes, in the rain and misery of the Springbok winter, traipsing in and out to the Royal Commission in the city- an hour’s drive each way- struggling with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, living on willpower, not energy, seeing the miseries of modern farming as I drove past fields with bleak herds of cows deprived of their new calves, stopping the car to untangle desperate goats tied up and used as lawn-mowers on the road-side, I used to wonder what was wrong with me.

Why was I so out of step with everyone and everything? And then I discovered a group in England called Women for Life on Earth, and I knew I wasn’t mad after all, and that my concerns were those of many others too. Knowing this restored my confidence and gave me heart. (This group morphed into the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, and their historic resistance to nuclear weapons.)

My illness had got worse. I couldn’t bear light, and had tortoise shell rattan blinds on every window as well as curtains, I had difficulty understanding speech and used to exhort the children and my husband to speak clearly. I couldn’t bear any music except formal baroque tunes, and was in constant pain.

Somehow, I kept up with driving the children around, having friends and Patrick’s family to stay, his other four children and their friends for meals, walking the dogs twice a day, cooking decent nutritious food on time, fulfilling numerous speaking engagements – teachers conferences, school prize-givings, parents groups, schools, Rotary and other clubs, even the annual lunch of accountants – to mention a few – writing the columns which generated so much controversy and so many letters to answer, not to mention the dreaded housework. I paid the teenage children to help… my daughter to do the washing, my son to clean the bathrooms.

And at the end of this hard, sad winter we left our dream home in the country, where no-one had waved or spoken to us in over a year, and moved back to town, where friends welcomed us, strangers called in with fruit and flowers and cakes, and we felt we had come home.

A young, unprejudiced and open-minded woman doctor friend dropped in to see me, while I was having an episode of CFS. Mimi introduced me to Re-birthing, a system of connected breathing which was all the rage at that time, and this was a turning point for me. The breathing got me on my feet, and I was now strong enough to become involved with a personal growth group, Self-Transformation, which I helped to establish in this country.

It grew exponentially. This was the early eighties, when groups like EST were breaking down so many barriers, and people all over the world were ready to start their journey towards self-actualisation. Jung was often the starting point, his book and his theme ‘Modern Man in Search of his Soul’ in tune with the new age.

Abraham Maslow, Ken Wilbur, then Dipak Chopra, Jean Houston, Caroline Myss, one after another, names and techniques came crowding into our consciousness, and people like me couldn’t get enough…meditation, yoga, Reiki, shiatsu, rolfing, holotropic breathing, aromatherapy, sweat lodges and other methods of bodywork we explored put us in touch with our emotional blocks and old traumas, and kept us busy for years.

Buddhism, the Essenes, Hawaian Kahunas, Shamanism, gurus from Ram Dass to Sai Baba, Raj Neesh, and the Dalai Lama held many in thrall – though gurus were not for me – and this is only to touch on a few of the influences, techniques and people who influenced my friends and I as we journeyed on. I sold most of my precious things to pay for all this… silver from my first marriage, oriental rugs I’d collected over the years, a precious French provincial table… it was worth it.

It was all a mystery to my husband, who called me a New Age Nutter, which didn’t bother me at all. I tried often to explain what I was doing, and it didn’t matter how often I did, he never understood or remembered.

He had a different journey. He had ten jobs in twenty years, travelling from radio back to newspapers, then magazines to public relations, radio again, magazines, to teaching journalism and back to newspapers, finally becoming editor- in- chief of a group of suburban newspapers when he was in his early seventies. They were years of financial insecurity, when he was badly paid, and I was glad to still have some money from my writing and then the counselling practise that I managed to operate for all those years until I was in my mid-seventies.

In every job he found, pressure would build-up, and he would be unable to see eye- to-eye with his boss, just as he had been so often at the Star. It’s only as I look back that I realise that this was his modus operandi.

He’d come home and I’d sympathise and take on the angst and the anxiety. We moved house often, buying old wrecks which I restored and beautified, each time hoping that by reducing the mortgage or making life easier at home, with less travelling, or some other excuse, it would reduce his stress. It never did.

He had also become obsessed with Japan, and apart from writing books about it, studying its history and customs, and collecting anything Japanese, he became an expert on samurais, Japanese sword-play – kendo and eido- and antique Japanese swords, which were hugely expensive. He was always buying more and more precious ones, as he learned more and more about them, and went to Japan half a dozen times.

As my car fell to pieces, because we couldn’t afford to replace it, he was ‘investing’ he assured me, in his swords, which would pay for our old age, so we didn’t need to save or pay off the mortgage. I believed him.

And so we came to the end of our roads. As Paul Coelho wrote: “It is always important to know when something has reached its end. Closing circles, shutting doors, finishing chapters, it doesn’t matter what we call it; what matters is to leave in the past those moments in life that are over.”

Next week is the last instalment of this series. The Who-dun-it of the Thomas case will be told in an Appendix the week after that.

Food for Threadbare Gourmets

As we talked about our go-to puddings over a nice drop of affogato in our favourite restaurant, one of my closest friends asked me for the recipe for my hot chocolate sauce for ice-cream I was boasting about. This is for her.

It comes from good old Mrs Beeton, and my children loved it over ice-cream, while I serve it for guests now with pears baked in wine plus ice-cream.

Blend together a rounded dessert spoon of cornflour, two rounded dessertspoons of cocoa powder, and three rounded dessertspoons of sugar with a little cold water measured from half a pint. Boil the rest of the half pint of water and pour on the mixture. Pour into a saucepan and boil for two minutes, stirring all the time. Add three drops of vanilla and half an ounce of butter. Simple and delicious.

Another instalment of my autobiography before I revert to my normal blogs

In the first few weeks after arriving in New Zealand, before starting my new job, I listened to the radio in John’s little home, trying to get the hang of this new society. I heard one item which seemed to rivet the whole crime-free nation… about a farmer and his wife, Harvey and Jeannette Crewe who had disappeared, and now their bodies had been found in the Waikato river.

Some time later, I learned with everyone else, that another farmer had been arrested for their murders. I never read crime pages, so knew no more. In the meant- time I was settling into my new life and my new job, and eventually, new relationship. I learned later that the Assistant Editor had said to himself at the end of my surprisingly long job interview – “Watch it Booth,”

But he hadn’t, and we became – I thought – good friends on the strength of his frequent trips to my typewriter bearing cables from all over the world that he thought would interest me. Everyone else was apparently aware of the situation, but I counted him among my other visitors.

But when at the end of my first year in the job, I heard that he was leaving to go and try to resurrect a rather boring Catholic newspaper, I felt a sudden sense of abandonment, and realised that I’d come to rely on his support and friendship. When I told him how I felt, the friendship moved to another level, except that I also told him that if he didn’t feel he could tell his wife about meeting me, then it wasn’t ok.

I had no intention of breaking up a marriage, even though I knew it had limped on since a drama five years before I arrived in the country. My words, plus domestic dramas, the stress of his newspaper, and collision with the Bishop and Catholic church, caused him to end up in the heart unit of Auckland hospital. During the next ten days, as he struggled with life, I realised I loved him, and that he might die and I’d never even held hands with him.

When he came out of hospital we came to an agreement. He’d decided to separate from his wife and we would eventually marry. So we did. He resigned from the Catholic newspaper and the Auckland Star took him back with open arms. At the same time, the news item I’d heard on the radio two years before suddenly assumed significance. Arthur Thomas, the farmer convicted of the double murder had many supporters who were convinced that he was innocent.

They had formed what was called The Arthur Thomas Re-Trial Committee, and had managed to get the case re-heard by several judges, and finally won a second trial for Arthur Thomas. On the strength of the evidence, Pat Booth was convinced that he would be found not- guilty, and released. He decided to get Thomas’s story and negotiate for it himself, so attended some days at the Supreme Court.

He began to feel troubled by the atmosphere in the court – prosecution versus Thomas supporters. The day the verdict was due, he was going home, and decided if he saw a parking space, he’d stop and go in.

There was. He did. He arrived as the jury delivered their verdict of Guilty. The uproar that broke out, rage, despair, wails, screams, shouts, tears, Vivien Thomas, his wife, running down the court to face the jury crying “What sort of people are you? he’s innocent,” and Arthur Thomas’s mother’s anguished cry “There is no justice here” shocked him profoundly. He came home very upset, and said he would have to investigate what was behind all this.

As he’d watched and listened in the last few days of the trial he’d become convinced that this was no impartial justice involving police, lawyers and judges, but an un-equal struggle between the power of the State and an individual with one hand tied behind his back. He’d watched the way the family were victimised, their seats in the public gallery taken from them and a burly policeman sitting in the seat where Arthur’s mother sat so she could see him.

Arthur was bullied and harassed in cross questioning – instructed to answer yes or no when neither response was correct, and when to answer that way would be to fall into a carefully prepared trap which Thomas could see for himself, but got no protection from his pleasant but bumbling lawyer.

So began seven years of study, investigation, travel all over the world, interviews, police harassment, hostility from many sections of society especially the police and the legal profession, and even phone-tapping.

The police soon realised that Patrick was investigating their work, and strange things began to happen. The first was my beautiful leather brief case being stolen from my parked car… the thieves obviously thought it was Patrick’s, having discovered where we lived. The next thing was waking in the night, and seeing a tall man in a grey suit with a stocking over his head at the foot of our bed, as he reached into where Patrick’s suit jacket was hanging in the wardrobe. I sat up and cried out: “there’s a man in the room” and he bolted, blundering into my daughter’s bedroom on the way to the front door.

Patrick raced after him, but the man disappeared into the Domain. I was just ringing the police, when he returned. Don’t bother he said – that WAS the police. In the mean-time, Patrick had contacted the forensic scientist for the defence, Dr Jim Sprott, who had had his theory about the bullets that killed the Crewe husband and wife, shot down in court.

Patrick had the cartridge cases that were supposed to be from bullets which had killed the couple blown up in the newspaper darkroom. The photos showed that the cartridge cases had different markings stamped on the base. This was crucial, because these markings showed the date the cartridge cases had been made, and they didn’t match the year when the No 8 bullets found in the bodies had been made. This proved that it was impossible for the cartridge cases and the bullets ever to have been together . This discrepancy was at the heart of the case.

The cartridge cases had been found in the murdered couple’s garden three months after it had been strip-searched, and so it was something of a ‘miracle’ when the police found them. By ‘finding’ them they were able to match them to the marks made by Arthur Thomas’ rifle, the person they’d already decided was the guilty man.

He lived happily on his farm with his wife Vivien, ten miles away. In his youth he had had a crush on Jeanette Crewe, and the police had decided that over ten years later, maddened by jealousy of her husband of several years, he’d travelled across country on a bitter rainy winter’s night, and shot them both through the window. He then returned to his wife’s warm bed ! His alibi was that he was in his cow-shed tending to a sick cow, and his wife’s testimony was discounted.

Patrick’s investigations showed that many small but incriminating details had been tweaked, altered or omitted between the first and second trials by both police and crown prosecutor in order to secure a guilty verdict. The collaboration between Patrick and Jim Sprott whose professional reputation was at stake, was an intricate detective story in itself.

It took them to the ICI ammunition factory in Melbourne where, by tracing ten- year- old manufacturing records, they demonstrated to the company the distinctive wear marks of the stamps on the bottom of the cartridge cases which could chart the dates of their manufacture. ICI became fascinated by the course of the story, as were many others.

Patrick had already written a damning book in a few weeks, but his publisher’s legal counsel advised against publishing the manuscript. So in a couple of days he reduced the incriminating story to ten newspaper articles which were then taken up and published all over the country. They caused an uproar. No-one had ever queried or criticised the legal profession or the police in this peaceful law-abiding country, and many people were now shocked and disquieted.

The legal profession and the judges were up in arms, protecting their profession, but the attorney general ordered the case to go to the Court of Appeal while Patrick and Jim were in Australia. It looked like a victory and I rang to tell him. Then it was disclosed that the police had removed the vital cartridge cases from the Police Museum and buried them outside Auckland in a rubbish tip of several hundred acres. Strangely they were never called to account for this obstructive action.

By now we had moved to the country, and we discovered that both our phones, and Jim Sprott’s were being tapped. When a technician checked our lines for repair and found a double jumper on them at the exchange, we knew we had been spied on. We felt we were under constant surveillance. Witnesses who Patrick interviewed were also visited by the police afterwards and told their evidence was not needed and therefore they did not have to go to the Court of Appeal.

Every visit Patrick made to CAC, the ammunition manufacturers in Auckland, was followed by a visit from the police, attempting to silence them, while obstacles were continually put in Patrick’s way, even when they went to Australia. And twenty-six thousand cartridges from all over the country were sent to him and Jim Sprott for them to verify their theory by inspecting the bases of the cartridges cases. Even I became an expert, and could look at the bottom and identify them – Big C, Little C, depending on the date of manufacture.

The case dominated our family life for the next eight years. Even the children were caught up in fall-out at school, where other children parroted their parent’s responses to Patrick’s ‘trouble- making’ work’, while at a Royal garden party, a judge cut us dead, turned his back and walked away when we were introduced as we chatted on the lawns of Government House.

Most disheartening of all was to discover that the Crown Law Office had framed the questions to be answered at the new Court of Appeal in such a way that Patrick and the Re-Trial Committee and lawyers had no way of making their points. It looked as though the Establishment were once again conspiring to make sure that Arthur Thomas would continue serving his unjust life sentence.

To be continued

Food for Threadbare Gourmets

Still wanting nice hot puddings during our winter chill, I decided on that wonderful easy self-saucing chocolate pudding. Beat three -quarters of a cup of castor sugar with a hundred gms of butter, and then add the yolks of three eggs one at a time. Add three level tablespoons of SR flour and two hundred gms of melted chocolate. Gently stir in two cups of milk. Beat three egg whites with a pinch of salt until stiff and gently fold into the chocolate mixture. Pour into a buttered two litre pie dish and cook in the centre of the oven at 180 degrees for forty- five minutes.

It rises like a soufle, and underneath the dark chocolate top is a soft sauce. Good with cream and poached pears too, if you feel like pushing the boat out!

Food for Thought

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. Edmund Burke*

I’d always thought that Burke said these words…. but apparently not according to one of my readers. However, Burke does imply the same thing in some of his writing …

We’ve been re-watching a favourite TV series on Youtube from some years back… Foyle’s War. Unlike real life, it’s one of those satisfying forms of entertainment in which the baddies always get their come-uppance, and the goodies triumph – hurray !

Second time around I relish the masterly performances by actors at the top of their art…and notice many little quirks and anachronisms I’d missed first time around. But this time, I’m really aware of Foyle in a way I hadn’t been before. Much water has passed under the bridge since the years when this series – a favourite with watchers on both sides of the Atlantic – was created.

And since then the world has changed in so many ways, which include the upsurge of terrorism with the advent of Isis, the unprecedented invasion of Europe by another culture – not just by refugees – but by armies of young men from third world countries looking to improve their lot and enjoy the largesse of western society; and many other factors like the spread of sex changes even among young school children, drunkenness among women in the UK on a scale unheard of previously, homelessness on the streets of many towns and cities, plus the religion of political correctness which means that on Twitter, another new arrival, people can be metaphorically crucified for using the wrong word…

I try not to equate the pictures of society men and women at various depraved looking parties where guests are encouraged to personify ’filth’, the photos of young people on the streets reduced to zombies by killer drugs, and stories about university students who feel it’s Ok to sue their instructors for not helping them get better grades, with the decline and fall of the Roman Empire… Society collapsed then for many reasons, not least the gulf between rich and poor, and the bacchanalian orgies of self- indulgence which we see today with the zillion dollar superyachts, and four or five day weddings of the rich and famous costing millions of pound/dollars, typical of the Roman over-indulgence and selfish hedonism in the last years of that Empire.

Christopher Foyle, the detective chief living in Hastings, the pretty coastal town where William the Conqueror landed, and defeated the defending Anglo-Saxon army in 1066, reminds me of some of the qualities of civilisation that I sometimes fear that Western culture is forgetting. While all around – to mis-quote Kipling – are losing their heads, failing to take responsibility, and blaming the war for profiteering, dishonesty of various degrees, for petty crime, spying, revenge and murder, Foyle remains incorruptible, refusing to cede one iota of the rule of law, built up over the centuries by generations of lawgivers and members of Parliament to create a fair and decent society.

He’s an ordinary person in every way, laconic, kind, and generous, but implacable when it comes to refusing to accept wrong in any form, never sparing family, friends and colleagues, as well as law breakers. He reminds me of Marcus Aurelius’s words: “Whatever anyone does or says, I must be emerald and keep my colour.” He keeps his colour no matter who around him is losing their integrity, and integrity is the word which most describes the quality that is Foyle.

Winston Churchill once said of Ernest Bevin, the great post-war Labour foreign secretary that: ‘he had many of the strongest characteristics of the English race. His manliness, his common sense, his … simplicity, sturdiness and kind heart, easy geniality and generosity, all are qualities which we who live in the southern part of this famous island regard with admiration.’

He called him a great man, and by that measure, so is Foyle. Why do I dwell on this fictional character in a long running detective series – the only one I’ve ever watched since murder, mayhem and mystery don’t tickle my fancy? I do so because this sort of person was not so rare as to be unusual many years ago. I can think back to many fine characters who people the English way of life – the only one I can write about with any knowledge.

People like the great statesman and gentle man, Edward Balfour, noble Sir Edward Grey, foreign secretary who tried to be peacemaker before World War One, to the thoroughly honest, decent, modest man who succeeded Churchill as prime minister – Clement Atlee. Honest politicians were not so unusual back then. They upheld the values of civilisation without even considering that by living lives of integrity this was what they were doing. And every person, however unknown, living such a life, is still today, of inestimable value to their society and civilisation.

Kenneth Clark at the end of his magisterial book ‘Civilisation’, wrote he believed: “that order is better than chaos, creation better than destruction. I prefer gentleness to violence, forgiveness to vendetta… I think that knowledge is better than ignorance and I am sure that human sympathy is more valuable than ideology… I believe in courtesy, the ritual by which we avoid hurting other people’s feelings by satisfying our own egos. And I think we should remember that we are part of a great whole, which for convenience we call nature. All living things are our brothers and sisters.”

He goes on to say that it is a lack of confidence more than anything else which kills a civilisation, and that we can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion. And this to me is what Foyle is all about. He never succumbs to cynicism and disillusion, but sticks to the great truths of kindness, justice, the rule of law, compassion and courtesy. These are the qualities which can preserve and save our civilisation, despite the depravity of the rich few, and the hopelessness of the homeless and deprived.

Western civilisation, with its ideals of freedom, kindness, fairness, justice for all, value for learning and for literature, for art, music and science, our recognition of the rights of all people and all races, and for all creatures; our care for the environment and for those who need protection, is a way of life worth preserving.

If we do believe this and do not succumb to the belief that we have to cede these freedoms and rights to other cultures and customs which deprive others of freedom, dignity and the right to happiness, cultures which dictate how people should think, what they should wear, and mutilate women in the belief that a Creator demands this, we can still save our own way of life – what one blogger calls ‘the True West” in Arthurian/Camelot terms.

We can still bequeath peace and harmony to our children and grandchildren, and we can try to share these blessings with all people. We can continue to believe in those great words from the American Declaration of Independence written in 1776, that: ‘all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness’.

Tolkien defines the task for us in the Lord of the Rings, his epic about saving civilisation: ‘I wish it need not have happened in my time,’ said Frodo. ‘So do I,’ said Gandalf, ‘and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.’

Food for threadbare gourmets

Cakes- easy ones. This is one of my favourites – combining lemons with the easiest method ever. I adapted it from one of Elizabeth Luard’s recipes, and use 175 gms of SR flour, 175 gms of sugar and the same of mild olive oil, three eggs, pinch of salt and zest and juice of a lemon. I also add a teasp of vanilla into this mix in memory of my grandmother who always used vanilla in her cakes. Stir it all together and tip into a greased lined loaf tin, and sprinkle a generous helping of caster sugar on top. Cook in a moderate oven for about forty minutes or until ready.

Food for thought

Even as our few remaining wilderness areas are threatened, each day more of us venture into these beautiful landscapes to experience the energy for ourselves. And, immersed in the natural rhythms of the earth and the wind and the sky, our minds relax and we view our lives with quiet perspective. We can see our paths and can recognise the synchronicity that has guided our footsteps.
James Redfield from The Tenth Insight